By Anna Ladipo
September 3, 2026
It started with someone not showing up.
A colleague could not attend a training session, and my manager sent me in their place with a simple instruction: go, learn, and come back to share what you learned with the team. The team was spread across multiple geographic locations. I delivered the debrief, fielded questions, and watched people engage with the material in real time. Something about that experience stayed with me in a way that a project delivery milestone never quite had.
Not long after, I began teaching at a private training institute on the side. Looking back, it was not entirely surprising. I had taught children’s church for years, and there is no sharper test of your ability to hold a room and make complex ideas land simply than explaining them to a group of four-year-olds. The owner of the institute noticed something in how I taught and said so, repeatedly. Students responded.
I share this because if you are a mid-career project manager (PM) who has occasionally wondered whether your experience could translate into something beyond delivery, this article is for you. Not as a career advertisement, but as a practical map of what the crossing looks like, what it requires, and what it gives back.
1) Your experience is not background. It is your content.
One of the most common concerns practitioners raise when they consider teaching or research is whether their industry experience is academic enough. They are usually asking the wrong question.
A mid-career PM carries something no textbook can replicate: the lived knowledge of what happens when a project meets reality. The stakeholder who changes direction at week eight. The risk that was documented and ignored. The team that held together under pressure because of something the project plan never captured. That knowledge is not anecdotal. It is empirical, and in the right academic context, it is exactly what students need.
Students preparing to enter complex organisations need to hear from people who have navigated them. The theory matters. The frameworks matter. But the practitioner in the room is the one who can say: here is what this looks like when it is working or not working.
Best practice: Take stock of what you have done, not just what your CV lists. The projects you navigated, the decisions you made under uncertainty, the teams you led through difficulty. That is your content.
2) Teaching forces you to articulate what you know tacitly.
Experienced practitioners carry a particular kind of knowledge without being fully aware of it. The instinct that tells you a project is in trouble before the metrics confirm it. The read on a stakeholder room that shifts your approach before anyone has said anything directly. Teaching requires you to make that knowledge explicit.
You cannot tell a graduate student to trust their instincts. You must break down what those instincts are made of, where they come from, and how they are developed. That process of articulation is one of the most intellectually demanding things a practitioner can do, and one of the most professionally valuable.
When you teach what you know, you understand it more deeply. Concepts you applied automatically become frameworks you can explain, defend, and refine. The classroom is not a departure from professional development. For practitioners who engage with it seriously, it is an accelerant.
Best practice: If you want to test whether you truly understand something, try explaining it to someone who does not. Teaching is one of the most rigorous knowledge audits a practitioner can put themselves through.
3) The profession needs practitioners who contribute to knowledge.
Project management is at an inflection point. PMBOK® 8 has shifted the conversation from task execution to value delivery and strategic alignment. Agile, hybrid, and AI-enabled approaches are reshaping what PMs are expected to do and know. The pace of change is outrunning the pace at which academic literature can document and analyze it.
That gap is an opportunity for practitioner-scholars. The professionals managing these changes, and observing their effects on teams and organizations are sitting on research material the field needs. A practitioner who can document a real transformation, analyze what drove its outcome, and contribute that analysis to the profession is adding something pure researchers working from the outside cannot easily replicate.
This is not about pursuing credentials. It is about recognizing that the profession benefits when the people who know it best are also contributing to how it is understood, taught, and advanced.
Best practice: Look at what you are already observing in your work. Is there a pattern, a gap, or a question that keeps surfacing? That is often where research begins. You do not need a formal programme to start thinking like a researcher.
4) The crossing is not a departure. It is an extension.
The most persistent misconception about moving into academia is that it means leaving the profession. In practice, the opposite is true. Teaching keeps you engaged with the next generation of practitioners. Research keeps you anchored in the questions the profession has not yet answered. And the credibility you build in both spaces strengthens your standing in each.
The practitioners who make this transition most successfully bring industry with them, deliberately and continuously. They consult alongside their teaching. They draw on active professional networks to bring real voices into the classroom. They publish work that speaks to practitioners, not just to other academics.
If you are a mid-career PM with a decade or more of real delivery experience, you are not at the beginning of a potential academic contribution. You are already most of the way there. The question is whether you are willing to make it visible.
Best practice: You do not have to choose between practitioner and scholar. The most valuable contribution often sits at the intersection of both. Start by asking what you know that the profession does not yet have well documented.
Your Checklist: 4 Questions for the Mid-Career Project Manager Considering Crossing to Scholar
If you have wondered whether your experience has a place in academia, research, or professional education, start here:
| Question to Ask Yourself | What It Surfaces | |
|---|---|---|
| ☐ | What do I know that I cannot fully explain yet? | Tacit knowledge is where your research and teaching potential often lives. Start there. |
| ☐ | What questions keep surfacing in my work that nobody has answered well? | Recurring unanswered questions are often the seeds of meaningful research contributions. |
| ☐ | Have I ever taught, mentored, or trained either formally or informally? | Most practitioners have more teaching experience than they recognise. Acknowledge it and build on it. |
| ☐ | What would the profession look like if what I know were better documented? | This is the practitioner-scholar's core question. If the answer matters, it is worth pursuing. |
A Final Reflection
Nobody told me I was going to end up in a classroom. A colleague missed a training session, a manager sent me in their place, and something shifted. What followed was years of corporate delivery, teaching on the side, a formal academic role, and now a PhD programme — all while staying connected to the profession that made the teaching worth doing in the first place.
The path from practitioner to practitioner-scholar is not a dramatic reinvention. It is a gradual recognition that the experience you have built has more than one form of value. You have been delivering knowledge in every project, every team, and every hard conversation you have navigated. At some point, the question becomes whether you want to start delivering it intentionally.
If the answer is yes, your experience is already the foundation. The rest is building on what you already know.
Anna Ladipo is an Associate Professor and Academic Director of a Project Management Certificate Program at a leading research university in Texas where she teaches graduate-level courses in project management, operations management, and leadership.
With over 20 years of experience leading enterprise transformation programs at Fortune 500 companies across banking, insurance, and financial services, Anna brings real-world executive expertise into the classroom and beyond. Her work sits at the intersection of industry, academia, entrepreneurship, and professional development equipping leaders at every stage with the tools to deliver results.
As the founder of NGSIT Inc. and its subsidiary Luxstopp, she has delivered project management and leadership training to corporate clients across North America while supporting entrepreneurs and small business owners in building and scaling their online presence.
